Introduction

Multicoin Capital co-founder & managing partner Kyle Samani, an early investor in both Solana and FTX, is turning his attention today towards the NFT space.

In this episode of the Scoop, Samani shared his strategy and investment thesis on where he sees NFTs going in the coming months. Samani believes that NFTs will evolve from their current form of mostly static jpegs and become more dynamic, similar to how Web pages evolved since the early days of the internet.

"So far in NFTs we don’t really have a lot of ‘pieces of state’ that have a relationship to one another," he said. "You vaguely have this in the notion that there are 10,000 apes in a collection, but beyond the fact that they all have the ‘ape tag’ on them, they actually don’t really have a relationship to one another.”

Samani used Beeple’s 5000 Days, a collection of 5,000 small NFTs in a 2x2 grid as, an example:

“[MetaKovan] who bought it should introduce some sort of game and say, ‘if you can assemble 9 of the 5,000 in a square, you unlock something.’ Now you can start to say that these NFTs have relationships to each other in some sort of unique way.”

While Samani sees a lot of potential for innovation in the NFT design space, he believes that it is “unlikely” that Multicoin Capital will hold even a 1% position in NFTs. Instead of buying in NFTs directly, Multicoin Capital is investing in the underlying technology.

“There are three major layers of the stack to think about, and we are investing in two of them,” Kyle said. Those two layers are the 'primitives or infrastructure layer,’ and the second is in NFT exchanges or marketplaces directly. The third layer, outright ownership of NFTs, Samani doesn't currently see as being viable enough for Multicoin Capital to invest in at scale.

Episode 16 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Kyle Samani, Founder & Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Chainalysis

Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime

Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Chainalysis

Chainalysis is the blockchain data platform. We provide data, software, services, and research to government agencies, exchanges, financial institutions, and insurance and cybersecurity companies in over 60 countries. Our data powers investigation, compliance, and market intelligence software that has been used to solve some of the world’s most high-profile criminal cases and grow consumer access to cryptocurrency safely. Backed by Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, Paradigm, Ribbit, and other leading firms in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains to promote more financial freedom with less risk. For more information, visit www.chainalysis.com.